The myth of the effortless genius

When I was younger, I wanted two things: to be cool, and to be brilliant. Or perhaps to put a finer point on it, what I wanted was to at least be seen as those things.

If you’ve read Gone Girl, you probably remember this monologue (I think about it probably once a week):

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)

(Still so good, right?)

There are so many ways this desire to be a Cool Girl manifested for me. I picked up hobbies that give off the right aura of aloof hipsterdom, and I wouldn’t admit to watching reality TV on the weekends. I’d eschew the comfortable for the controversial, and temper my conversational contributions, because seeming mysterious is infinitely preferable to cringy enthusiasm. Over time, this construct of a personality started to feel inextricable from who I was actually becoming. Can enough artifice become authentic through repetition? (I think I actually do love rose matcha and fountain pens…) But all the while, I harbored this bizarre fear that I was taking up so much space with what I should want to be like that there was no room left for who I would have been freed from any internalized expectations.

And even if you are actively engaged in becoming the Cool Girl, above all else, remember that you cannot be seen carving this personality for yourself from the raw marble of your existence. It must appear spontaneously, fully formed and with just the right amount of worn-in patina. There is no crime more appalling to a certain set than the act of trying too hard. Quelle horreur! I remember reading a book once in which the characters’ main appeal was their old money sensibility, and there was a story about how only the really wealthy would wear cashmere sweaters with holes in them, because it shows the cashmere is likely vintage and because it reflects a certain shrugging insouciance. How did I ever stand a chance, when I understood “striving” to be the worst insult someone could hurl?

The same goes for displays of intellect, or honest curiosity. We tag our inside jokes with gleeful assertions of “if you know, you know.” What if I don’t know? I know enough not to ask. I’ve learned through too-eager efforts at connection that it’s fine to be smart, but not so smart that you make anyone feel inferior, inadvertent or otherwise. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s fine to be smart, but keep that shit to yourself. No one likes a know it all. But what to do if your deepest, most genuine cravings all center around wanting to know it all?

We probably all remember a few people growing up who seemed to possess such a vast natural intellect that they didn’t have to try hard, or at all. Homework was done half-assed the morning of class, or never, and yet they were always the top scorers on the exams. Teachers left them basically alone, because they were so functionally complete in their knowledge that to shepherd them through the same exercises as the remaining luddites felt almost offensive. A lot of times that overconfidence in one’s natural abilities is bruised and battered (or decimated entirely) as one progresses through college and post-grad (ask me how I know), and thank God for that. Once I accepted that there will always be someone smarter than me, I gave myself the freedom for the first time to try hard. Once I realized I had basically reached the ceiling of whatever uncultivated intelligence I was born with, the whole world opened up. I devoted myself, belatedly, to becoming an excellent student, and it paid dividends.

To some extent, I consider myself a reformed wannabe. I spent a lot of years on the edges of things; the irony that my transparent longing to be included was the very thing that barred my entry is not lost on me. There were people I perceived as having it all, and appearing to have exerted no effort at all to make it so. I wanted to know the secret to that kind of apathetic success so badly it felt like it would kill me. I wouldn’t even say that I ever stopped wanting that, just that eventually I decided the effort it took to shape myself into a simulacrum of a Cool Girl became less interesting than the effort of consciously seeking out people who didn’t mind if I tried too hard. If I was “extra” about the things I cared deeply about. And go figure—turns out that makes you cool in the right circles, after all. Now, when I love things, I love them in an uncomplicated and open way; I’m reading experimental litfic and watching Love Island and playing classical piano and spending an hour on my hair…and reminding myself that I contain multitudes, and that’s a beautiful thing.

So here I am, begging everyone to put in the effort, and to show your work. Sure, the process of doing something hard can be ugly, embarrassing, effortful, and long, but maybe we no longer care to live lives of contrived indifference and icy superiority. Maybe there is an incredible amount of compassion and connection to be found in baring our inner workings to each other; in commiserating over how we all fall short, and celebrating the days when the hours of labor—unseen, but no less important for it—finally pay off.